Production systems are highly complex systems, and several courses within the Master’s Degree in Management Engineering address the production of goods and services from multiple perspectives: technological, industrial, economic, operational management (both for single firms and for companies operating within supply chains), and quality management. The analysis of operational performance measures and the impact that variability and configuration choices may have on them is fundamental both for understanding how these systems operate and for providing insights and information useful at the operations strategy level. Indeed, making strategic decisions in any domain - whether technological, economic, or logistical - requires understanding how the system to be managed or designed behaves under different scenarios of external demand or internal management conditions. Knowledge in this field represents an important cultural and professional asset for Management Engineers, particularly for roles such as production process manager (at the operational level), production director, or product manager (at the strategic level). The course builds upon undergraduate courses in Management Engineering that introduce the main issues related to the operation and management of production systems (both manufacturing and service systems) and the principal operational methods used in this context. In addition, it complements the knowledge provided by Master’s Degree courses that analyze production systems from the other perspectives mentioned above. The aim of the course is to develop analytical tools for evaluating the main aggregated performance measures of production systems. These tools enable not only the prediction of performance indicators, but also a deeper understanding of system behavior and of the factors influencing it. Analytical methods are presented together with a discussion of their limitations and with the illustration of alternative approaches, such as simulation, which can be used to overcome these limitations.